Seagate’s Exos and IronWolf 16 TB Hard Drives Are Now Available

[Tsing]

Data hoarders, take note: Seagate’s 16 TB hard drives are now hitting retailers. There’s the Exos X16, a helium-based enterprise drive, as well as an updated IronWolf HDD designed for NAS. The press release only mentions a price for the Exos ($629), but PC Connection has the IronWolf in stock for $590.80. The Exos is also available at Provantage for $623.15.

Exos X16 HDD is the world’s highest capacity 3.5-inch 7200 RPM drive designed to solve challenges by enabling hyperscale, datacenter, OEM and distribution channel businesses to maximize storage capacities, provide customer flexibility, and reduce complexity with uses in multiple workloads with increased I/O and enhanced caching capabilities. Seagate’s new Exos X16 16TB drive delivers 33 percent more petabytes per rack compared to 12TB drives while maintaining the same small footprint for a reduced overall total cost of ownership. Exos X16 offers built-in data protection, including Seagate Secure™ Instant Secure Erase for safe, affordable, fast, and easy drive retirement.

“The Exos X16 is key in reducing total cost of ownership for enterprise system developers and cloud data centers while supporting multiple applications with varying workloads,” said Sai Varanasi, vice president of product line marketing at Seagate Technology. “The Exos X16 is the industry’s leading helium-based 16TB capacity drive. We are partnering with our cloud/enterprise customers to bring this product to the market to fulfill the pent-up exabyte demand in data centers. ”

Seagate continues to establish new benchmarks in speed and capacity with the additional announcement of IronWolf and IronWolf Pro 16TB drives, built for multi-user NAS environments and supporting workloads up to 300TB/year. IronWolf is the ideal drive for home and small office NAS systems that deliver performance, low noise and low power consumption, making it efficient for everyday use such as back up, remote access and file sharing. IronWolf Pro drives are robust for NAS that operate in creative pro and small-medium business environments that demand heavy workloads to support their data needs.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

My first thought when I saw this was, how many platters are in this thing?

From Anandtech, "Previously, we had been expecting Seagate's first shipping 16 TB drives to be based on their HAMR technology – select Seagate customers began receiving the company’s HAMR-based Exos X16 drives back in December. However it turns out that Seagate is not going to ramp up those HAMR drives quite yet. Instead, Seagate has taken the somewhat surprising step of building a 16 TB 3.5-inch helium-filled hard drive based around nine PMR+TDMR-based platters. "

Around 9 it seems.

 

[Riccochet]

We've been using the X12 SAS drives for a bit now as backup storage. I can say I'm pretty impressed with the storage density and performance of these drives. Out of the 72 we put in to production only 1 has failed, and that was in the first 3 days during setup and burn in. Expected 2-3 from previous deployments.

I'll have to see about these X16's as we consider adding another 24 drive shelf. Density is becoming important and we're filling out racks in our datacenter faster than we, or our hosting provider, would like.